New Site Section: Authors

A big update today. Based on popular request, you can now check out our Authors section (click on "Authors" on the menu to the right). It's pretty sparse right now. It has a list of all the authors people have submitted in the series database. There are fields for users to add information if they choose. The most interesting parts of this new section are the "Most numerous genre" column, which shows you the works they release the most of, and you can click on a specific genre to see other authors who focus on that specific genre. Also, if you click on an author you can see a list of series that they have authored, and their genre. Hopefully this section will expand in the future and turn out to be as successful as our series database. If you notice, if you are a registered user you can edit information or add your own authors. If anyone would like to join Baka-Updates and help maintain the authors database on a more extended basis, send me an email at manick _at_ baka-updates.com. If you have previously registered but have been denied an account, and would like to help out with the authors section, re-register, and we'll be sure to add you. We would be very appreciative of your help!

I don't think the author database will be very useful until some sort of consistency is achieved when people fill out the author form. Right now, I don't think people are even consistent with listing names Japanese or Western style (e.g. Akino Matsuri or Matsuri Akino). Also, there are issues like the fact that Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle lists Ageha Ohkawa as the author, and thus it doesn't come up when you look up CLAMP. I think it'll be a useful thing -- I've often looked at the author field and wished I could just click on that name and do a search for other series by the same person -- but it'll need a lot of policing, or some other implementation, to really work.

Well, it's a really new section. I basically just took the authors from the series database, so if they weren't added correctly, I can't really do much about that. Hopefully, people will submit error/mistake changes for names. The fact that names are backwards/forwards is one of the things that reallly bothered me when I was writing the section--but hopefully this can be fixed in time. People can put more than one author for series too.. for instance, Ageha Ohkawa *and* CLAMP--That would be acceptable, just put them on different lines. We're also looking for someone who really knows manga authors to help out with this and maintain the authors section. Granted, it'll take a while to actually make the section work (it took months to make the series section work), but hopefully it'll be a useful and informative section someday.

I thought about this some more and have decided to try to add some type of consistency in our database. Names will be surname followed by given name. I'll try to back this up with code but it could be a few days. I'm also going to remove as many duplicates as I can find, as some names have slightly different spelling, or their name order reversed.